Lethal

In Brown’s latest romantic thriller, beautiful young widow Honor Gillette and her four-year-old daughter, Emily, wind up on the run through coastal Louisiana with a suspected mass murderer named Lee Coburn. Given the genre, it should come as no surprise that the rugged, self-reliant Coburn is no homicidal maniac and that he and Honor will eventually fall in love. Everything else is up for grabs, since the cops, nearly all of Honor’s former friends, and maybe even the FBI are in the employ of a vicious drug lord and white slaver known only as the Bookkeeper. The villains are ruthless, the action perilous and plentiful, and Victor Slezak’s narration wrings every drop of suspense from Brown’s twisting and turning plot. Slezak also provides a full range of Southern accents: Honor’s aristocratic, angry bully of a father-in-law, the redneck local law enforcement louts, and a sweetly sexy woman of means. Slezak even adds timidity and self-doubt to his portrayal of an FBI agent struggling with an impossible investigation, a passive-aggressive wife, and a permanently comatose child. A Grand Central hardcover. (Sept.)